Nmap 3.81 Released; Pr0n; License Non-changes

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

Hello everyone,

I'm sorry to report that the most popular pages on Insecure.Org are
going away.  You might expect the most popular to be the Nmap pages,
top 75 tools list, or the home page itself.  Nope: The most popular
(by bandwidth usage) have been the HaXXXor pr0n Nmap training videos
and files at http://www.insecure.org/nmap/nmap_haxxxor.html ever since
I posted them a year ago.

Some people found them offensive, but I'm not doing this to please the
censors.  I simply cannot afford the bandwidth.  On some days E-lita
generates several terabytes of traffic.  More recently, porn sites
have discovered the images and began linking them inline to their own
pages.  Grrrrr!  I may be able to keep the page around for now, but I
have removed the movies and most of the high-res pics.

In other news, some users have expressed concern about the new Nessus
license.  If you want to use Nessus and all its plugins for
consulting, you are now required to fax Tenable a signed license
agreement requesting permission.  You must also promise not to
redistribute or reverse-engineer the plugins
(http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?consultant=1&email=c&product=).
They also instituted a $1200/year charge for the latest plugins ( a
delayed feed is available free with registration for certain limited
uses).  They also now claim that many of the existing Nessus plugins
were never open source.  At the same time, they rewrote the Nessus web
page to emphasis that Nessus is "<i>the</i> open-source vulnerability
scanner".

Note that the Nessus and Nmap projects are completely separate
organizations.  I am a huge fan of Renaud and the Nessus team's
excellent work, and won't take any position on their license change.
They argue that this change is neccessary to maintain quality and
satisfy sharholders.  They could be right, but I want to reassure
people that the Nmap project has no plans to follow suit.  All of
Nmap, including the OS detection and service detection databases,
remains available under the GNU GPL.  Some of the 3rd party libraries
it uses (libpcap, libpcre, OpenSSL, etc.) are under different licenses
such as BSD and LGPL, but they are all open source.  You can continue
to use it for whatever you want, from consulting, to network
administration, or even evil haxxoring, without asking permission,
signing a license agreement, or divulging personal information on a
registration form.  If you ever decide that I'm an insufferable tyrant
rather than benevolent steward of the Nmap project, you have the right
to fork off and redistribute your own version.

And now for the good news!  I'm pleased to release Nmap
3.81, which contains dozens of feature enhancements and bug fixes over
3.75.  These include an XSL stylesheet by Benjamin Erb that allows you
to render Nmap's XML output as HTML in a browser.  Fragmentation
scanning was fixed and enhanced (thanks to Martin MaÚk) so that you
can now specify fragment size.  I finally got around to adding
packet/byte counters so that you know how much traffic Nmap generated.
Improvements were made to several scan types, a new
"closed|filtered"state was added, the service detection database grew,
and some important bugs were fixed.  Here is a more complete and
detailed list of changes:

o Nmap now ships with and installs (in the same directory as other
  data files such as nmap-os-fingerprints) an XSL stylesheet for
  rendering the XML output as HTML.  This stylesheet was written by
  Benjamin Erb ( see http://www.benjamin-erb.de/nmap/ for examples).
  It supports tables, version detection, color-coded port states, and
  more.  The XML output has been augmented to include an
  xml-stylesheet directive pointing to nmap.xsl on the local
  filesystem.  You can point to a different XSL file by providing the
  filename or URL to the new --stylesheet argument.  Omit the
  xml-stylesheet directive entirely by specifying --no-stylesheet.
  The XML to HTML conversion can be done with an XSLT processor such
  as Saxon, Sablot, or Xalan, but modern browsers can do this on the
  fly -- simply load the XML output file in IE or Firefox.  Some
  features don't currently work with Firefox's on-the-fly rendering.
  Perhaps some Mozilla wizard can fix that in either the XSL or the
  browser itself.  I hate having things work better in IE :).  It is
  often more convenient to have the stylesheet loaded from a URL
  rather than the local filesystem, allowing the XML to be rendered on
  any machine regardless of whether/where the XSL is installed.  For
  privacy reasons (avoid loading of an external URL when you view
  results), Nmap uses the local filesystem by default.  If you would
  like the latest version of the stylesheet load from the web when
  rendering, specify 
  --stylesheet http://www.insecure.org/nmap/data/nmap.xsl .

o Fixed fragmentation option (-f).  One -f now sets sends fragments
  with just 8 bytes after the IP header, while -ff sends 16 bytes to
  reduce the number of fragments needed.  You can specify your own
  fragmentation offset (must be a multiple of 8) with the new --mtu
  flag.  Don't also specify -f if you use --mtu.  Remember that some
  systems (such as Linux with connection tracking) will defragment in
  the kernel anyway -- so test first while sniffing with ethereal.
  These changes are from a patch by Martin MaÚok
  (martin.macok(a)underground.cz).

o Nmap now prints the number (and total bytes) of raw IP packets sent
  and received when it completes, if verbose mode (-v) is enabled.  The
  report looks like:
  Nmap finished: 256 IP addresses (3 hosts up) scanned in 30.632 seconds
                 Raw packets sent: 7727 (303KB) | Rcvd: 6944 (304KB)

o Fixed (I hope) an error which would cause the Windows version of
  Nmap to abort under some circumstances with the error message
  "Unexpected error in NSE_TYPE_READ callback.  Error code: 10053
  (Unknown error)".  Problem reported by "Tony Golding"
  (biz(a)tonygolding.com).

o Added new "closed|filtered" state.  This is used for Idlescan, since
  that scan method can't distinguish between those two states.  Nmap
  previously just used "closed", but this is more accurate.

o Null, FIN, Maimon, and Xmas scans now mark ports as "open|filtered"
  instead of "open" when they fail to receive any response from the
  target port.  After all, it could just as easily be filtered as open.
  This is the same change that was made to UDP scan in 3.70.  Also as
  with UDP scan, adding version detection (-sV) will change the state
  from open|filtered to open if it confirms that they really are open.

o Fixed a bug in ACK scan that could cause Nmap to crash with the
  message "Unexpected port state: 6" in some cases.  Thanks to Glyn
  Geoghegan (glyng(a)corsaire.com) for reporting the problem.

o Change IP protocol scan (-sO) so that a response from the target
  host in any protocol at all will prove that protocol is open.  As
  before, no response means "open|filtered", an ICMP protocol
  unreachable means "closed", and most other ICMP error messages mean
  "filtered".

o Patched a Winpcap issue that prevented read timeouts from being
  honored on Solaris (thus slowing down Nmap substantially).  The
  problem report and patch were sent in by Ben Harris
  (bjh21(a)cam.ac.uk).

o Changed IP protocol scan (-sO) so that it sends valid ICMP, TCP, and
  UDP headers when scanning protocols 1, 6, and 17, respectively.  An
  empty IP header is still sent for all other protocols.  This should
  prevent the error messages such as "sendto in send_ip_packet:
  sendto(3, packet, 20, 0, 192.31.33.7, 16) => Operation not
  permitted" that Linux (and perhaps other systems) would give when
  they try to interpret the raw packet.  This also makes it more
  likely that these protocols will elicit a response, proving that the
  protocol is "open".

o The windows build now uses header and static library files from
  Winpcap 3.1Beta4.  It also now prints out the DLL version you are
  using when run with -d.  I would recommend upgrading to 3.1Beta4 if
  you have an older Winpcap installed.

o Nmap now prints a warning message on Windows if Winpcap is not found
  (it then reverts to raw sockets mode if available, as usual).

o Added an NTP probe and matches to the version detection database
  (nmap-service-probes) thanks to a submission from Martin
  MaÚok (martin.macok () underground cz).

o Applied several Nmap service detection database updates sent in by
  Martin MaÚok (martin.macok(a)underground.cz).

o The XML nmaprun element now has a startstr attribute which gives the
  human readable calendar time format that a scan started.  Similarly
  the finished element now has a timestr attribute describing when the
  scan finished.  These are in addition to the existing nmaprun/start
  and finished/time attributes that provided the start and finish time
  in UNIX time_t notation.  This should help in development of
  XSLT stylesheets for Nmap XML output.

o Fixed a memory leak that would generally consume several hundred
  bytes per down host scanned.  While the effect for most scans is
  negligible, it was overwhelming when Scott Carlson
  (Scott.Carlson(a)schwab.com) tried to scan 24 million IPs
  (10.0.0.0/8).  Thanks to him for reporting the problem.  Also thanks
  to Valgrind ( http://valgrind.kde.org ) for making it easy to debug.

o Fixed a crash on Windows systems that don't include the iphlpapi
  DLL.  This affects Win95 and perhaps other variants.  Thanks to Ganga
  Bhavani (GBhavani(a)everdreamcorp.com) for reporting the problem and
  sending the patch.

o Ensured that the device type, os vendor, and os family OS
  fingerprinting classification values are scrubbed for XML compliance
  in the XML output.  Thanks to Matthieu Verbert
  (mve(a)zurich.ibm.com) for reporting the problem and sending a patch.

o Rewrote the host IP (target specification) parser for easier
  maintenance and to fix a bug found by Netris (netris(a)ok.kz)

o Changed to Nmap XML DTD to use the same xmloutputversion (1.01) as
  newer versions of Nmap.  Thanks to Laurent Estieux
  (laurent.estieux(a)free.fr) for reporting the problem.

o Fixed compilation on some HP-UX 11 boxes thanks to a patch by Petter
  Reinholdtsen (pere(a)hungry.com).

o Fixed a portability problem on some OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines
  thanks to a patch by Okan Demirmen (okan(a)demirmen.com).

o Applied Martin MaÚok's (martin.macok(a)underground.cz) "cosmetics
  patch", which fixes a few typos and minor problems.

As always, you can download Nmap from from
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/nmap_download.html .  The paranoid
(smart) list members will check the cryptographic hashes and GPG
signatures available from
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/dist/sigs/?C=M&O=D .

I hope you like it!  Let me know if you encounter any problems.

Cheers,
Fyodor


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